Archie Hall

A great read

FWIW I’ve used the mass-scanning web extension for a bit now and been pretty impressed— both at how it’s aligned with my intuitions and with docs where I do have a sense of the provenance. Obviously imperfect but it gives a pretty strong prior. (There are very few X accounts I follow that have a 50% share of their posts AI flagged as Carns does.)

@ArchieHall Whilst I don't doubt it, Pangram does have a tendency to blow smoke up your arse because people only use it when they are arguing with someone.

Let's, please, stigmatise people passing off AI text as their own. And doubly so from politicians—whose job it is to do the work of explaining to voters what they think.

@MDC12345678 Those are also important! But so too, I think, is respecting your voters enough to offer them your own words (frankly, even if ghostwritten). There’s an implicit proof-of-thinking there that lets you take it at least a bit seriously, which is absent in AI writing.

Surely the most important questions are (1) whether what he is saying is factually correct and (2) whether he can defend the substance of his argument in public. If he were putting things out without being able to reason from first principles, I would agree with you. But I do not think that is the issue here. He is doing TV and newspaper interviews and is more than capable of making a public defence.

@RichardOllingtn A hand-typed, artisanal one no less

@ArchieHall Is that an ironic em dash I see

@Sam_Dumitriu Half-agree. Trouble is it's unknowable on the output side whether it was that (which is probably fine, assuming one dictates something fairly precise, rather than a few vague thoughts that AI makes specific) or just "write me a post", which I do think we should be rude about.

@ArchieHall I suppose it depends on their workflow/prompt. If they’re dictating to AI and then asking the AI to clean it up, and make it more suited to Twitter, then I don’t have an issue.

@AlistairCarns @pangram AI?

A few things happening at once that people should connect. Russia is now linked to the arson attacks on the Prime Minister's house and car last year. Shocker. And we all saw what happened the moment that story broke. Our feeds flooded with a different story about who the men were and why they did it. That's the operation. The arson is one half. The disinformation campaign is the other. Flood the zone, muddy the water, get the country shouting at itself instead of asking who is behind it. And at the same time, a chunk of the accounts pushing Scottish independence on X went dark the night Israel hit Iran's nuclear sites. Ask yourself why. Why would hostile states be interested in sowing division across the country? This is exactly what I mean when I say defence is the thread underneath everything now. Again, it isn't tanks on a border. It's an arson attack on the PM's front door and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns in the replies. It's the argument about breaking up our country being run out of Tehran. This is why resilience matters. And it's bigger than just factchecking a tweet. It's energy we can rely on. Industry we actually own. Institutions that are rock solid. Communities that don't split and fracture the moment someone pushes them. A country that is built to take a punch. That's the job now.

Two thoughts on Reform's cut NI / tax foreign workers proposal: 1. Fans of tax simplification are in for a rough few years, if Burnham is in No 10 and Reform are the main opposition. 2. If the foreign-worker tax deters employers, then it won't raise much money. If it raises money, it definitionally isn't deterring that many employers. And, regardless, I struggle to imagine how such a narrow tax can cover the cost of a broad-based tax cut like employer NI.

New post by me and @Simon__Grimm: nineteen thoughts on Europe and AI. siliconcontinent.com/p/nineteen-tho…

@ArchieHall @AlistairCarns We believe that this document is fully AI-generated pangram.com/history/6a2c30…

@AlistairCarns @pangram ai?

This week the most advanced AI model on the planet got switched off by a foreign government. British researchers were studying it. British companies were testing it. British hospitals were piloting it. Not any more. This isn't an AI story. It's the story of every industry we used to lead. Britain has some of the best AI talent in the world. DeepMind was built here. Our AI Safety Institute writes the rules other countries follow. We have the researchers, the universities, the standards. What we don't have is the power stations to run the data centres, the planning system to build them, or the industrial base to make the chips. So the work happens here and the value lands somewhere else. We invent. Others build. Others decide. Then we read about it on Saturday morning. Same story as the kit our soldiers don't have. Same story as the factories we used to. I spent nine months in government making this argument inside the room. I'll make it louder from outside.

This is, perversely, good news for Britain, Australia, Japan, Europe, and other countries being cut off that would once have seen themselves as close allies of the United States. It shows us what the future may hold if AI is the strategically and economically decisive technology of the 21st century and is controlled by the US and China. It is good news because *it may be happening early enough to give us time to act.* I think this will be rescinded pretty soon, but it’s a sign of things to come. In a future where frontier models cannot be used outside the US, our industries and economies will fall behind and American businesses may not be able to operate overseas. We won’t be able to defend ourselves militarily with defence systems built on obsolete software. Europe 2031 is a good scenario of what a future like this could mean: europe2031.ai Some of the things we need to do are ‘no regrets’ measures we should do anyway. But some are genuinely costly and risky. We need cheap electricity – powered by gas, coal (this is costly, coal is very bad), deregulated nuclear fission – whatever can provide *cheap, reliable, 24/7* power. This almost certainly excludes wind power, which is enormously expensive and unreliable. We need projects to be able to connect to the grid in days rather than years by paying for fast-track connections. We need to make it incredibly easy to build data centres, with the property taxes retained locally and hypothecated for local tax cuts so there is some direct benefit for locals. This doesn’t need to be nationwide. We need to create new regulatory regimes for innovative businesses that give them the right to hire and fire staff with ease. The difficulty and cost of firing staff is one of the main reasons Europe has fallen behind so badly. We need to create a parallel employment regime that companies and workers can opt in to: worksinprogress.co/issue/why-euro… Even though I think it will probably fail, I think we should probably try to create a good, non-American frontier AI lab. I am quite pessimistic about this – even extremely well-resourced, innovative software companies are struggling to do this. But the stakes are so high that not trying seems foolish. One thing that might work in our favour is the number of brilliant AI engineers who are not US citizens, who under the current export controls do not have access to Mythos/Fable even if they live and work in the US. What happens to Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy, and the many other Europeans, Canadians, etc who are working on AI models in Britain and America who are affected by this? I do not think we should force our own companies to use model, because this would exacerbate their economic weakness – this lab should have to compete on an even playing field. I am deeply sceptical that this can work, but we cannot rule it out. If we do it, it has to be able to pay US salaries, operate without political constraints. worksinprogress.co/issue/how-airb… It is cope to tell yourself that Trump is an aberration or that these export controls are a one-off. To repeat, I think these specific controls will be lifted quickly and it will be easy to move on and forget it happened. But this is a look into a potential future. Every one of us that is not a US citizen is at risk. The standard political divides do not apply here; the question is whether you grasp the enormity of AI as a technology. We have to act!

Notable how much less intelligent Opus 4.8 feels after even a few days using Fable

Water and energy are already in public control! And energy in particular is in an abject state because of it. Meanwhile, AI…

In the morning, European citizens will wake up and find their access to Claude Mythos/ Fable gone. Nobody asked us. Nobody had to. We wrote Europe 2031 precisely for this moment.

Beyond the obvious reasons why this is mad, citizen / noncitizen is a particularly odd axis to split this on. Plenty of nasty hackers with US passports, and surely foreign evil-doers wouldn’t find it that hard to spoof citizenship.

I wrote a feature on what went wrong with Britain over the last 20 years, economically and politically: - Almost zero wage growth since '08 - GDP per person on par with Mississippi - 6 PM's since 2016; 7th expected soon - The ascendancy of Nigel Farage

@Ned_Donovan Even clearer if you take in everything back to the start of the year

@Ned_Donovan I have the web extension running and it seems like it's something of a pattern for him

According to Pangram, the best AI detector that has a less than 1% false positive rate, Al Carn’s resignation letter was 100% AI generated. Here is the report for anyone to read: pangram.com/history/8922d5… The letter has several well known LLM fingerprints and are obvious to spot for anyone familiar with writing like a human being. I’ve got no political opinion here at all, but it’s odd that a cabinet minister can’t even seemingly write his own resignation letter.

An Idrees longread on the state of Britain is, of course, self-recommending. theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/…